


Cabin Fever

by The_Asset6



Category: Shameless (US), Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, POV Mickey Milkovich, Shameless-Typical Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27218056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Asset6/pseuds/The_Asset6
Summary: When Mickey wakes up in an unfamiliar place, he’s only got two questions: where the hell is he, and who the hell is this Ian wannabe?
Relationships: Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	Cabin Fever

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome! To lighten the mood as I work on the next chapter of "In Pieces," I offer you a self-indulgent, fun little fic requested by tumblr's [filorux](https://filorux.tumblr.com/). I hope you enjoy it!

When Mickey woke up, he was instantly aware of two unmistakable facts.

First, he wasn’t at home.

Second, he was being watched.

The hair at the nape of his neck stood up, though not in warm, tingling anticipation of Ian already being awake before him and doing that creepy shit where he just laid there until Mickey joined the land of the living. This was eerie, the sort of foreboding sensation that sent a chill down his spine rather than a jolt of excitement to…other places.

And rightfully fucking so, as it turned out. Opening his eyes to find a _robot_ hovering an inch from his face was pretty damn creepy, which was saying a lot considering the family he grew up in.

“Shit!” Mickey yelped, jerking backwards in alarm and slamming straight into a metal wall that should _not_ have been there. Stars burst in front of his eyes, and as he rubbed his throbbing skull, the rest of the room transitioned from bleary shadows into greater clarity.

No, this definitely wasn’t home. Not by a long shot.

He blinked rapidly to dispel the image of what appeared to be the strangely lit interior of a soup can, but it had no effect on his surroundings. The grated walkway through the cylindrical chamber didn’t vanish, nor did the ring of lights at the far end behind an empty workbench flicker out. The cause of his sudden headache wasn’t the drywall in the bedroom he shared with Ian any more than the shitty excuse for a mattress beneath him could compare to the ancient, pathetic waste that they really needed to replace sometime in the near future if Mickey didn’t want to feel like an old man every fucking morning.

And the… _whatever it was_ didn’t go away either. It merely…watched. And chirped. Kind of. It was hard to describe.

The same could be said for the robo-thing itself. Jesus, it looked like a toaster fucked a camera and some Frankenstein motherfucker had slapped a couple of legs on it for kicks. But it was sentient—that much was obvious. Whenever Mickey dared to shift a muscle, its head tilted from side to side, the telescopic lens analyzing his every move. Then it whistled. Then it…booped. It shuffled in place, shined a bright blue beam in his eyes, and whistled some more.

Maybe Mickey was drunk. Or high. Or fucking nuts. Maybe the bipolar shit _was_ contagious and this was how Ian felt when he ran around the house with a baseball bat like a goddamn lunatic or thought the big man upstairs was talking to him. Whichever direction the wind decided to blow on that one, Mickey was ready for it to stop already.

Unfortunately for him, the minuscule bucket of bolts and glass didn’t want him going anywhere. It blocked his attempts at sliding off the bed, even going so far as to hop up onto his lap and trill loudly in his goddamn ear.

“Jesus Christ,” he groaned, contemplating whether it would break if he gave it a good shove. “Would you fucking _move_?”

Another chirp. It didn’t sound agreeable. That plus the sharp little extension that jutted out of its raised foot constituted a clear _no_ in Mickey’s book.

Well, Terminator Junior would have to Humpty Dumpty this shit and put itself together again, because Mickey needed to get the fuck out of here and find Ian. That would set him straight.

Seemingly summoned by the notion of his husband alone, footsteps echoed through the chamber from outside the open doorway, and Mickey froze in place as somebody cautiously crept inside—somebody with red hair, freckles, green eyes, and a long fucking metal rod in his hand. Was this a dream or goddamn prison all over again?

And _why_ did that asshat look so much like _Ian_? Or a far less attractive version, anyway. Apart from the hair and fucking albino-adjacent skin, they had nothing in common. Ian’s face wasn’t marred with scars across his nose and cheek, and this guy had obviously never been in lockup. Scrawny fucker.

He wasn’t a total waste of space with regards to intimidation techniques, though. The moment he spotted Mickey, his center of gravity lowered and his fingers visibly tightened around the baton he held at the ready as if he knew how to use it. Clobbering Mickey wasn’t his immediate goal, but it was nevertheless on his mind. Okay, so _maybe_ he was more similar to Ian than Mickey initially gave him credit for.

“Who are you? And how’d you get in here?” the guy demanded, and shit, he even _sounded_ a bit like Ian. Not that Mickey gave a shit. Nobody bossed Mickey Milkovich around.

“Fuck off,” he groused, standing. The toaster had to leap onto the bed so that it didn’t wind up on the floor.

Not-Ian rotated his wrist slightly so that Mickey could see his thumb preparing to depress a button he hadn’t noticed built into the side of the rod. “I’m only going to ask one more time.”

Snorting, Mickey sneered, “Man, I ain’t telling you shit. Where’s the exit on this nuthouse?”

One step. That was as far as he got: one step, then a beam of orange light blocked his path to the door.

_What the fuck… Is that a fucking lightsaber?!_

This couldn’t be happening. He had to be high.

The heat radiating off Not-Ian’s lightsaber, however, was all too real. His eyes reflected the amber glow, narrowed suspiciously and waiting for him to surrender either himself or the requested information.

Nobody bossed Mickey Milkovich around, but that didn’t mean he was a moron.

“Jesus, _fine_ ,” he muttered, hands raised placatingly. “It’s Mickey.”

Not-Ian didn’t lower his weapon. “Who are you?”

“I just fucking to—”

“Who _sent_ you?” he impatiently amended. “The empire?”

The what now? As far as hallucinations went, this one was pretty fucking detailed. Mickey would have to remember to ask Ian if that was normal or if he’d reached a new level of crazy.

_Ian…_

“Look, nobody fucking _sent_ me,” he sighed with a minute gesture towards the door. “I just wanna get the hell out of here.”

“And go where?”

“Home, asshole.”

His lightsaber lowered a fraction, but his expression was still hard. “What planet are you from?”

_Oh, for fuck’s sake._

Mickey deserved that. Truly, he did. Reasoning with figments of his imagination? What answers did he expect to receive here?

“The one where shit makes sense,” he grumbled, more to himself than Not-Ian. And sure, he might have been exaggerating a bit: his South Side lifestyle wasn’t what he would call the epitome of rationality, but it beat staring down the length of a fictional weapon at a guy who very much _wasn’t_ his husband while a toaster trilled at him. That was the stuff shrinks were invented to deal with.

Not-Ian, however, hadn’t quite figured out that none of this could possibly exist. He observed Mickey in silence, his gaze scanning over what Mickey belatedly realized were _not_ his clothes. They were akin to what this bozo was wearing and far less comfortable than his old jeans and broken-in shirts, not that that came as much of a shock.

What _did_ was how quickly Not-Ian’s hand unexpectedly shot out to grab him around his left wrist, and Mickey didn’t have a chance to do more than grunt in surprised irritation before it slid downwards to clutch at his hand. Or, more specifically, his fucking _wedding ring_.

“Hey, Chuckie, back the… Whoa, you okay?”

It sure didn’t look that way. The second Not-Ian’s fingers closed around the band that _Actual_ -Ian had given him a few months ago, his eyes drifted shut and his expression turned almost _pained_. Mickey watched as his balance faltered and he staggered backwards a step, the urge to shove past him and run dissolving as rapidly as it had arrived. Shit, after all these years, it was finally happening: Ian Gallagher had made him soft as fuck. 

The episode or whatever the hell it was didn’t last long, and Mickey was taken aback at how Not-Ian eyed him once again, his distrust evaporating immediately. Instead, he was contemplative, his lightsaber powering down as he slipped it into a loop on his weird-ass belt.

That was one problem taken care of, he supposed.

“Maybe we can help each other,” was the first thing that came out of Not-Ian’s mouth, and it didn’t fucking sit right with Mickey at _all_. So much for solutions.

“Yeah, I don—”

“I’m Cal,” he interrupted, gesturing towards the toaster. “And that’s BD-1.”

“Uh-huh, whatever. I said I ain’t go—”

“Follow me. I’ll introduce you to everybody.”

And with that, he was gone, BD-whatever hot on his heels and Mickey gawking at his back.

See, the sensible thing to do would have been to sit his ass down and go to sleep. When he woke up, life would be normal again, or as normal as it ever was in the shitshow he navigated daily. Ian would be there, and Mickey would tell him all about this dumbfuckery so that they could laugh over it while they pretended to forget that Ian really shouldn’t drink coffee on his meds. Best course of action, right there.

But Mickey never opted for the simple road and was admittedly less than eager to learn what would happen if he was wrong. He couldn’t greet consciousness with that fucking toaster again. One of them wouldn’t survive it. That on top of how _real_ everything around him felt? It wasn’t worth risking. The _second_ best course of action was probably just to play along until this acid trip inevitably ended.

Besides, was it so wrong for him to be curious?

So, he _chose_ to follow Cal. He wasn’t taking orders. That was Ian’s bag once upon a time, not his. In fact, he took his sweet ass time meandering down the hallway, examining the closed doors to either side, and cursing under his breath at the sight that greeted him when he emerged into a far more inviting space than the one he’d initially been subjected to.

It was like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, meaning that it fit the theme of this goddamn delusion to a tee. There was a kitchenette where normal shit like a microwave or stove had been replaced with metal boxes that Mickey couldn’t identify; a terrarium to his left was sprouting plants that he hadn’t seen around Chicago, although he’d never been into that crap enough to really tell how objectively odd they were. An enormous couch curved around the cabin below, and beyond that, Mickey’s eyes widened at the holographic display that apparently charted their trajectory between…planets. Numerous huge, unfamiliar planets.

Mickey’s left thumb trailed towards the underside of his ring finger, nervously stroking the warm metal. Irrational as it might have been, he couldn’t evade the unease that accompanied his sudden realization that Ian wasn’t on any of them. Neither was their house, their now-shared family, or even the one he tried not to think about since doing so always made him contemplate homicide. For the first time since waking up in this shithole, his confidence was shaken, and he felt further from home than he ever had during his stint in Mexico.

If anybody else in the room sensed his discomfort, they were fucking smart not to mention it—and there _were_ other people. Well, he thought they were people. _Supposed_ to be people. All right, so not all of them were people: Cal was standing beside the glowing display, speaking in hushed tones to a motley crew of weirdos.

“What gives, kid?” a little greyish thing with too many arms complained while some chick with her face artistically carved up watched in open curiosity. “This ain’t a party ship.”

“It’s okay, Greez. _Really_ ,” Cal attempted to reassure him, though he was immediately rebuffed by an unimpressed black woman, who was the only other mostly normal individual in the room.

“Now isn’t the time to be trusting stowaways, Cal. Not after—”

“Cere. Just trust me.”

There were a few seconds of terse silence where they seemed to conclude the conversation through looks alone, but the lady— _Cere_ , apparently—ultimately relaxed and glanced over Cal’s shoulder to find Mickey watching them. The veiled affection in her eyes while Cal had been speaking vanished. Quick.

“All right,” she murmured with a nod. “If you’re _sure_ he has what it takes.”

“What _what_ takes?” challenged Mickey, skeptically raising his eyebrows. This bitch accused him of fucking sneaking onto their… _spaceship_ , and now she was expecting shit from him? They had to be bullshitting him.

Rather than offering a direct goddamn answer, she presumptuously continued, “We can offer a modest sum of credits for your help. And a ride to wherever it is you want to go.”

Nope. They _weren’t_ bullshitting him.

“Fuck, no,” Mickey scoffed. “All I wanna know is when’s the next stop so I can get off this tin can.”

Greez—which was an oddly apt name for the guy—folded one of his two pairs of arms over his chest, taunting, “What’s the rush?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mickey saw Cal glance at his ring and decided it wouldn’t behoove him to lie. He was, after all, at their mercy.

And he fucking _hated_ it.

“Got somebody waiting for me,” he grudgingly replied, purposely keeping it as vague as possible. _Who_ or _where_ wasn’t any of their damn business.

The pint-sized mutant wasn’t appeased in the slightest, and his wide mouth stretched even further to accommodate a humorless smirk. “ _You’re_ the one who snuck onto my _Mantis_ like she’s some kind of cheap imperial freighter. Price of admission, kid. Ever heard of it?”

“Not my fucking problem,” Mickey dismissed him. “I just need to get home.”

“And where _is_ home?” Cere asked.

That calculating expression on her face didn’t do shit to set Mickey at ease. Hopefully, the look he shot her was equally unsettling, full of indignation and a not so subtle dare for her to test just how far she could push him. And it worked. Sort of.

“Fine,” she yielded indifferently. “You don’t trust us, and we don’t trust you. But if your plan is for us to take you back to your planet, it’ll be impossible to do that without knowing where we’re going.”

Mickey wished that he had a scathing retort for that, but…she wasn’t wrong. Earth’s absence from that hologram might have meant that they had no fucking clue what Earth even _was_ , so he would practically be giving them goddamn directions. That wasn’t to say that he felt any more comfortable with ceding an inch of ground until he absolutely had to, though. Not killing each other on sight wasn’t the same as the benefit of the doubt.

Cal was good at reading a room, thank fuck. He lifted a hand to Greez when the latter opened his fat mouth to undoubtedly deliver another quip about the stupid goddamn ship, and his demeanor was noticeably gentler when he interjected, “We’ll make sure you get home, but we have one stop to make first and could use all the help we can get.”

It was a question. He didn’t phrase it as one, but Mickey could see it in his eyes. He could refuse. He could tell all of them to go fuck themselves then chill on the couch until they were done with their shit and able to drop him off.

Yet there was something so…so _Ian_ about the way Cal was looking at him. Those green eyes of his were honest and trusting despite knowing fuck-all about Mickey; the caution and suspicion had leaked out of him entirely, leaving nothing but casual anticipation in its wake. It brought an image to the surface of Mickey’s consciousness that he hadn’t reflected on in a while: a different redhead who Mickey damn near beat to death with a tire iron only for the idiot to gaze up at him as though he were some kind of fucking miracle. There was surety in the depths of those eyes, a certainty that Mickey had a semblance of _good_ inside him even if he questioned it himself.

And well, that decided it for him.

“Yeah, okay,” he capitulated, idly smoothing his eyebrow so that he wouldn’t have to watch a pleased smile spread across Cal’s face. In an effort to preserve at least a little of his dignity, he gruffly added, “But you assholes owe me.”

Cere shook her head in unbridled exasperation. Greez threw all four of his arms into the air and stalked towards the cockpit.

Cal? He lightly punched Mickey’s arm, his grin impossibly wide now, and told him to make himself comfortable before following suit with the Brave Little Toaster perched on his shoulder. As if Mickey could ever _make himself comfortable_ in a flying metal box that was traveling through fucking outer space at nauseating speed.

It didn’t help matters that the lady with all the shit on her face sat a few feet away from him and apparently hadn’t learned basic fucking manners. Jesus, it was like being in the psych ward the _one_ time he’d visited. There were reasons he hadn’t gone back, and this? This was one of them.

“Can I fucking help you?” he blurted out once the scrutiny gave him goosebumps. She didn’t so much as flinch at his outburst, which made the situation all the more unnerving.

“Where we are going is dangerous,” she informed him, her accent heavy and uncannily recognizable. “Do you require someone to teach you how to fight?”

Whether it was the insinuation that he couldn’t fucking take care of himself or how similar her voice was to Svetlana’s (if he never heard from that commie whore again, it would be too soon), Mickey automatically bristled. The hell would they have asked him to help for if he couldn’t fight?

“Bitch, you wish,” he muttered through clenched teeth. Of the two of them, _she_ was the one who seemed like a gust of wind would knock her on her ass.

Looks, however, were apparently deceiving. It happened so fast that he couldn’t fully appreciate it until it was over.

Her eyes flashed green.

His chest tightened.

His throat constricted.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fucking _breathe_.

And then he could. Her eyes were normal, and he was okay.

“Jesus, what the fuck?!”

The bitch didn’t answer, although she _did_ turn to watch the flurry of activity in the cockpit with a smug smirk on her lips. Mission technically accomplished, even if it left Mickey rubbing his throat while glaring daggers at her the whole way to…wherever they were headed.

In an odd stroke of luck, it didn’t take anywhere near as long as Mickey assumed intergalactic travel would. They landed on a shitty planet with a shitty name that he couldn’t pronounce and were peering down the ramp at a shitty hangar in record time, a blaster strapped to his side that he had haughtily claimed proficiency in using when…he was just winging it. The thing looked like a gun. It couldn’t be _that_ difficult, right? Point and shoot. Easy.

Nobody told him what they were hunting, not even Cal, but they assured him that he wouldn’t have to travel far to locate it. And that was great—it was fucking fantastic, because they barely got to the other side of the port before they were set upon by a bunch of freaks in white armor that was more plastic than anything remotely substantial. Their blasters were bigger than his, not that they could use them for shit, and Cal cut them down quicker than a fat dude could annihilate a buffet.

At least somebody was making headway.

“I thought you said you could use that!” he called over his shoulder when Mickey missed his third target in a row. As if he needed Gallagher levels of busting his balls right about now.

Resisting the urge to flip him off since the bastard wouldn’t see it anyway, Mickey steadied his grip against the metal crates he’d taken cover behind and shouted, “I’m a little out of practice!”

…It wasn’t a total lie. It _wasn’t_. Threatening Terry for that wedding bullshit aside, Mickey had his heavy artillery on lockdown for the most part. Debbie and her fucking ultimatums. So what if there were little kids in the house? He’d grown up around that crap and turned out just fine.

Firing a gun was a bit like riding a bike, though: you never _really_ forgot, and Mickey shook the rust off soon enough to be of actual use. His chances of rivaling Cal’s body count were slim, but hey, he did okay. The toaster even waved at him in celebration and gratitude—or that was how Mickey chose to interpret it—when he blasted some shithead who tried to sneak up on them from behind.

Of course, their satisfaction was short-lived.

Just as the tide began to turn in their favor and it seemed that they might survive endless waves of troops without issue, the ground shook. Mickey’s cover rattled and, one by one, the boxes toppled over onto the concrete floor. The guys that had thrown themselves on Cal’s lightsaber one after another after another fell back, and a metal monstrosity the likes of which Mickey had never seen emerged from a nearby warehouse. It reminded him of Cal’s toaster buddy in that it was essentially a metal box on top of two robotic legs, but that was where the similarities ended. This was exponentially bigger and had goddamn _canons_ on the front.

It sure would have been useful as fuck if the B-thing were equipped with that shit.

One shot was enough to obliterate the pavement next to where Cal was standing, and he barely managed to duck out of the way as a volley of projectiles followed his progress. How he ended up next to Mickey, he had no fucking idea, nor would he get an opportunity to ask at this rate. They needed to make this quick or neither of them would get off this planet much less back to Mickey’s.

“BD, think you can shut that thing down?” he heard Cal inquire, and Mickey had to bite his tongue to refrain from pointing out the obvious. What did he believe his dinky little buddy bot was going to do to the equivalent of a goddamn tank? For fuck’s sake, there was a fine line between science fiction and stupidity, which made Cal one hell of a funambulist.

Clearly, nobody had enlightened the toaster to its own shortcomings. There was a nearly inaudible chirp over the explosions beyond their makeshift bunker, and then it was gone. Cal didn’t even stop to see whether it endured the next attack, turning to Mickey instead.

“I’ll distract it until BD can rewrite its protocols. Cover me, okay!”

Holy fuck, could this guy rival Ian in dumbass ideas or what? At the same time, all Mickey could do for now was go along with it. The alternative was getting himself killed, which wasn’t about to happen. If he died out here, he’d never hear the end of it from his fucking husband.

So, he whipped around and attempted to take aim—at the walking nightmare, at the projectiles, at the stragglers that hadn’t gotten the memo to run while they could. He fired a few shots. He kept an eye on Cal. He squinted to see if there was any sign of that toaster on the battlefield.

Then something wrapped around his waist and tugged and they disappeared—where’d they go—why was it dark— _get the fuck off me_ —

“Jesus, Mickey, what the fuck?”

Mickey bolted upright, breathing heavily with his fists clenched in front of him, except there were no enemies. There was no space port. There was no Cal or his toaster.

There was _Ian_ , who groggily rubbed his temple where Mickey must have clocked him when he woke up. That didn’t make any sense, though. He was… He was just…

 _Fucking moron_ , he scolded himself as the haze of sleep wore off.

No, he _wasn’t_ just in goddamn outer space. It was a dream—a dream that he could blame on his own fucking boredom. This pandemic shit was getting old as fuck after four months of being mostly stuck inside the house, and he’d spent the majority of his day getting shitfaced while Carl and Liam played some dumb Star Wars game. By the time he’d hustled upstairs with Ian, newly arrived from a double shift at work, he was half convinced that the main character _actually_ looked like him. If he squinted. A lot.

Here in the light of their bedroom—or, more accurately, the _dark_ of their bedroom—it was fucking obvious what an idiot he was. As if anybody could hold a candle to his husband, with his curly red hair and that sleepy crease between his eyebrows and the freckles that dotted the back of his hand where it was tugging insistently on Mickey’s tank top until he laid down again. As soon as he did, Ian was practically on top of him, and not in the horny way. Mickey didn’t mind a great deal, though. His warm weight was comforting, and Ian’s scent banished the odor of sweat and nonexistent, nonsensical gunpowder from his nostrils.

Once he was settled, still mostly asleep, Ian grunted.

Closing his eyes, Mickey ran his fingers through his husband’s hair and murmured, “Nothing. Gotta stop hanging around your brothers, man.”

Either Ian nodded or nuzzled into his shoulder. Regardless, he was already gone.

Mickey wasn’t far behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> For more on Shameless, Jedi: Fallen Order, my writing, and assorted fandom madness, I'm on [Tumblr](https://pathoftheranger.tumblr.com/)!


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